38 Cornmarket Street: The Plough

In 1772 a survey of every house in the city was taken in consequence of the Mileways Act of 1771. According to Salter, 38 Cornmarket Street was then in the occupation of Thomas Ensworth, and had a frontage of 6 yards, 0 ft. and 3 in.

The Plough Inn opened here in 1656. It is a Grade II listed building (list entry 1047327).

John Pickett, the landlord in the 1850s, also had a harness repository here.

By 1890 George Benham, formerly a clown in Boswell's Circus and known as the “modern Grimaldi”, was the landlord of the Plough.

Right: “The Plough Inn from Ship Street”. This nineteenth-century painting by William Panter Vernon (1850–1923), a heraldic engraver who was based in Wheatsheaf Passage off the High Street, is reproduced by kind permission of his great-grandson Mervyn Hughes

The first Plough Inn closed in 1924. A photograph and drawing of the old Plough and its proposed renovation was published in the Oxford Journal Illustrated on 8 July 1925.

In 1925 the old inn was rebuilt as a shop by the architect Thomas Rayson, and today only the windows and two pediments facing Cornmarket are original.

The Domestic Bazaar Company was here for a few years, and then the tailor Austin Reed Ltd was here for eighty years from 1936 (photograph). In 2016 the latter went into administration and all its branches closed.

In July 2017 planning permission was granted for change of use from shop to mixed-use shop/restaurant and café (17/01174/FUL). The new Plough Inn opened in January 2019.

Left: the old inn sign of a man with a plough and that of
Austin Reed sign behind are both now equally redundant

38 Cornmarket Street in the censuses

1841

This pub (not named) was occupied by the victualler Elizabeth Randall (30). With her lived the printer John Briton (30) and Ann Briton (20), and a 15-year-old dressmaker, Emma Feldon.

1851

The pub (again not named) was occupied by the innkeeper John Pickett (38) and his wife Elizabeth (45), as well as a “servant to work in stables” and a lodger.

1861

The pub was now named as the Plough Inn. The licensed victualler Richard Franklin (35) lived here with his wife Emma (36) and daughter Emma Jane (4), as well as an ostler and a female servant.

1871

Mr R. Franklin (44), licensed victualler, lived here at The Plough with his wife Emma (45) and their son Henry (9). They had three servants, and a builder and his wife boarded with them.

1881

William Robbins (46), the innkeeper at The Plough, lived here with his wife Mary (41), his niece Henrietta Tymins, who acted as a general servant, and his 7-year-old nephew Thomas Ludd. A “boots” also lived with them.